


Stepping Forward

by Michelle_A_Emerlind



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Canon verse, First Kiss, M/M, Spoilers for Season 5, season 5
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-29
Updated: 2016-01-29
Packaged: 2018-05-17 00:51:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5847496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Michelle_A_Emerlind/pseuds/Michelle_A_Emerlind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The group pauses at the South Carolina stateline and Daryl has a hard time leaving Georgia.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stepping Forward

**Author's Note:**

  * For [skarlatha](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skarlatha/gifts).



> This was originally written for skarlatha as a Christmas gift. So, oops! Just now getting around to posting it.

They stop near the stateline in a little cluster of houses that look relatively untouched since the first falls of the apocalypse. Rooting through them finds a couple of useful items--some nearly new blankets, first aid kits, a couple of knives worth keeping. They all need a breather for a moment, just a second to calm down from the drive that has been slow, but exhaustingly stressful moving through packs of walkers and around areas that look to be heavily populated. 

Rick and Daryl find themselves falling easily back into the pattern they had during their first winter. They leave the group and meander on their own, Daryl with his bow ready to shoot food or foe that steps in front of them. Neither of them take time to really process it, but they find themselves near a side road covered over with brush and leaves, a tilted, but readable sign saying  _ Welcome to South Carolina _ standing out against the stillness of nature. 

Daryl grunts. “Fuckin’ Carolina,” he grumbles and turns to start toeing over a place where mushrooms are growing, examining them to identify if they’re good to eat. 

Rick chuckles low in his throat. “Don’t like the Carolinas?” 

“Don’t like nothin’ that ain’t Georgia,” Daryl tells him simply and frowns, thinking of Beth and that night in the shack, moonshine in her eyes and way too many memories pouring out of his own lips. “Ain’t never left it,” he tells Rick. “Been here my whole life.” 

Rick nods as if this is expected and Daryl catalogues the differences between them again, so stark and real--how Beth never knew him, even in the moment she died. How it feels like Rick knew him before he was even born. He wonders where that comes from, what it says about him that it was like pulling teeth to open up and do that damn fucking game with her and what it says about him now that he’s aching to pour himself out before Rick and tell him all the emotion trapped under his skin like electricity boiling below the surface of a dam.

He’s goddamn fucked, is what he is. But the words don’t come and instead keep churning over and over in his mind, thickening into a film he can’t see past.  _ He misses her. He let her down. He killed that woman. Maliciously. For no goddamn reason. She was sorry and he knew it and he didn’t give a fuck and what does that make him? What line did he cross in Atlanta? And how can he deserve to move onward after it? He’s nothing but a fucked up redneck like everyone said he was gonna turn out to be and he showed it. Ain’t no place for him anywhere but in this goddamn suffocating state. He should stay with the dead and dying.  _

“We’re crossing when we get back to the cars,” Rick tells him and steps up on the road, knocks the sign as he passes it and suddenly moves out of Daryl’s circle into South Carolina. “Might as well do it now, you know? Your terms.” 

“Don’t wanna,” Daryl tells him simply and keeps his spine straight, being a fucking bull about it. 

“No, you don’t. Gonna have to, though.” 

“No, I don’t.” 

“We’re not leaving you.” 

“Know you’re not.” 

Rick sighs and shakes his head. “Come over here,” he commands in a voice as soft as the first light of a winter’s dawn. 

Daryl sighs and looks up at him, blinks and studies Rick standing there. The cock of his hips, the proud dip of his shoulders. He is beautiful like he has always been. Nothing--not the farm, not the prison, not Terminus, not Atlanta--none of that has changed Rick. He is a beacon in the dark, the pillar that has kept Daryl standing. 

But Daryl doesn’t know if he can do this. For all that Rick is for him, for all that they mean to each other---feelings never said--he doesn’t know if he can move. Because Carolina is so very, very far away. It’s a whole new man, a whole new  _ life _ even though that’s so stupidly naive. And he doesn’t deserve that. “I can’t,” he tells Rick. 

Rick cocks his head in that way he does, the little jerk of a motion that’s half a crack of his neck. “What if I give you something for it?” he asks and Daryl scoffs and rolls his eyes. 

“What’re you gonna give me that I can’t get here in Georgia?” 

Rick shrugs and then puts his hand on his belt, rotates his head side-to-side. “Gonna kiss you,” he says, with the strength of mountains. 

Daryl blinks. “Rick--” 

“It’s not always worse. Change.” 

Daryl falls into silence and closes his mouth, swallows. That’s something they’ve never done before, even though it’s so easy to tell what Rick’s eyes mean underneath the firelight, what his pupils dilating and his lips parting suggest. And what Daryl’s suggest right back at him, the flexing of his hands, the shiver in his skin. 

“Don’t let it break you,” Rick whispers to him. “Ever since…” Rick sighs heavily. “You’ve been...distant. But don’t let it take you, okay? Daryl, I know more than anyone the force of that flood. It sucks. Sucks so  _ much _ . But if you don’t let yourself remember there can be good in the world...you’ll die there. Right there where you stand. Right in Georgia. And I can’t see you die. So...won’t you come over here? Please? Let me show you.”

“I ain’t worth it,” he tries, but Rick just scoffs and shakes his head. 

“Neither am I.” 

Daryl sighs and stares at the sign, how it’s gone crooked and degenerate in the dust of civilization. Rick is beyond it not more than two feet and there’s really nothing different. The pines on the other side are still pines. The road is still the road. And so Daryl puts his crossbow against his back and steels himself, moves forward step by step until he is at the line. He pauses at it, stares at the dirt under his feet and takes a big breath into himself. But Rick extends his hand, holds it and waits until Daryl takes it within his own. And with one large, steady motion, Daryl falls into Rick’s embrace. And Rick catches him. And Rick kisses him. And Rick pours himself out and gives Daryl the permission there in that moment to truly collapse and let himself be. 

For the first time since the prison, Daryl’s muscles relax. And he opens his mouth to catch Rick’s tongue sweeping inside, moves his body to fall against Rick’s chest, waiting there for him, shifts his foot to put it between Rick’s, steady and true and sound in the Carolina dirt. And when they pull apart from each other--not very far at all--something has shifted in the air, in that one little tiny moment. Daryl feels new. Hopeful. And he is ready. 


End file.
